YSA conference weekend

Saturday was good; we started at McCarren Park in Brooklyn for a service project. I made a new friend! Haha yay me. Her name is Ashley and she’s super cool. She’s a graduate student at NYU; cinema studies is her major. We’re also in the same ward, so that’s going to be nice. Basically we just raked and bagged leaves for a few hours and they fed us breakfast and lunch. Met a couple other cool kids, too.

Went home for a shower, then up to the Lincoln Center building on 66^th street. All the meetings were in that building; the stake center is above the Manhattan temple. There were about five workshops for three sessions, and they all sounded pretty good.

The theme for the conference was Taking the Shield, from Ephesians 6:10-18, but especially verse 16 [also found in Doctrine and Covenants 27]. So each workshop topic was a fiery dart. The speakers basically went over how/why they’d be considered fiery darts and how we can shield ourselves from them. The topics were: attacks on the family, doubt, loneliness/being alone, dishonesty, media/pornography, workaholism/balance and possibly one or two others I’m forgetting…

Some highlights: Treat your family so that they will WANT to be your family for eternity. Doubt causes us to sit, quit and fail. There are no easy solutions to problems. But there are easy steps you can take toward a solution, but taking those easy steps will be hard.

Then there was dinner, then a dance. I didn’t look forward to that at all, but they did have cookies! Haha. They had mini black & whites, which were so cute, and yummy. Then they played a really offensive song that I did not appreciate. Made a couple more friends, I guess, at the dance; some people in our ward.

Took the subway back, obviously, but I had had to figure out earlier that the 1 wasn’t running below 34^th street on the weekends, so I took the 2 to Times Square and transferred to the 1, which takes you right to Lincoln Center. So we took the 1 back to Times Square and transferred to the R, which stops at 23^rd street for Ashley and Canal for me.

Mary invited me to get some food with her and some friends and then play a game, haha, but I declined this time so I could sleep. I was supposed to have a WSN meeting before church Sunday, but when I got there and called Tim, he texted me to say he forgot to cancel with everyone because his U.S. Open tickets were rescheduled from the day before. So I had a couple hours to kill, and then went back to the Lincoln building for sacrament and stuff.

Sacrament was nice until after it was actually passed, when the entire room of 700+ people started talking at once. That was pretty irreverent and disruptive to the spirit, so that wasn’t fun. The speakers were really good, though; three stake presidents spoke to us. And they were funny, too.

Some [unhumorous] highlights: If you seek the light, you will be a light. Own your life — don’t blame anybody else. [Take accountability for actions you do/do not take and fix problems].

Then lunch, which were really nice sack lunches: sandwiches, apples, chips, cookies and a very berry juice box. Plus we sat in the primary room and utilized the kiddie chairs to eat, so that was pretty much awesome. Then testimony meeting, which was less than awesome for me. Then the CES broadcast with Elaine S. Dalton, which was really good. Highlight from that: Seek virtuous friends, not virtual friends.

So the conference was like 89 percent awesome I’d say [which essentially translates to not as good as California did it. But let's keep that between you and I]. Especially the ‘I have a friend’ part. And she said she was going to institute, so that’s going to be cool. I don’t know who I’ve told, but institute is going to be on the Book of Mormon…in chronological order [starting with Ether…]

More news to follow.